On the Use of Grelvish in LotR Fanfiction
by The Bitter Little Flamer
Summary: A critical essay I wrote last night. Warning: Contains many bizarre linguistical phrases. Not for the faint of heart and English.


On the Use of Grelvish in Lord of the Rings Fanfiction  
  
Now that you've made it through my Mary-sue essays, I now am churning out a true, hardcore linguistic essay. For this essay, I pulled up various Grelvish fics and the Grelvish site to get roots of words for comparison, and also to fully comprehend the grammatical makeup of this language.  
  
Starting with the simplest of words, the personal nouns, I have found that in Grelvish, "amin" is me or my and "lle" is you or your.  
  
"Amin" has no true connection to Tolkien's Elvish languages, though the closest would probably be the Sindarin "im" and "anim," both personal words, the first being "I am or will" and the latter being "my" or "mine". The Quenya root for "I" or "my/mine," of which I am more familiar with, is the suffix "-nyë," transmuted into the Sindarin –anim.  
  
"Lle" is more related to the Quenya pronoun "le," which is also "you." It also is closely knit with the second person possessive "-lyë" (your). Indeed, if some of you have sharp ears you may have caught Legolas in the Two Towers saying "le," when Aragorn returned from "death" and Legolas gave him back the Evenstar. This was a mistake, of course, for very few spoke Quenya in the Third Age—more often it was a book-language, and some of the very old Elves, like Galadriel, Elrond, and Celeborn all had indeed spoken it back in the Second Age (in Beleriand ere it sank).  
  
When dealing with endearments and compliments, the Grelvish site has plenty. The most commonly used has to be "melamin" or "my love." Indeed the word for "love" in Quenya is the verb-stem "mel-"; however, this is to love as a friend. Apparently the makers of Grelvish didn't read the rest of the definition. As in true Quenya, the personal possessive has been added to the end instead of like in English, when we add it at the beginning of the noun phrase (i.e. My flower is pretty instead of Flower-my is pretty and Quenya Elanornyë ná vanya.).  
  
Also in the Grelvish site I found questions, many of which could be interpreted as rather lurid: "Lle lava?" for "Do you yield?". To someone with a mind as pervy as Tom Green's, that's quite…interesting, to say the least. The closest I can get to a Quenya root for 'lava' would be 'lanta'- to fall-, but if you tweak the 'nt' combination you can get a 'v', and indeed a different Elven kingdom may have used 'lava' as fall. Note again the bunchanged/b personal noun form in the question. It is quite easy to add the same personal stem onto a different noun or adjective, and even easier to translate an English sentence like "You're beautiful" (a phrase so commonly used in Mary-sue fics that if I find one without it, my hope for humanity grows another atom) into the Grelvish "Lle vanima."   
  
Again the personal noun is unchanged, a very simple thing to remember, and the adjective stays in the same form whatever the case, number, or gender. And the root of 'vanima' would be the Quenya root 'vanya' with an extra 'm' added. And since the consonant combination 'ym' is not allowed in any Elven language, it was changed to the vowel 'I'.  
  
It is easy to see why 'Sue authors so happily snap up these phrases- the grammatical rules are essentially the same as English, as far as I can tell, and the only time you'd even bother to learn the complex grammatical rules of Quenya (as well as memorising ten cases and four declensions) would be if you have way too much time on your hands, like myself.  
  
I have spoken a lot about Quenya in this essay, and that is not entirely right. Quenya was more of an Elven-latin in the Third Age of Arda, and the only time we hear about it in iRings/i is the short greeting Frodo says to Gildor- "Elen síla lumenn omentielvo" and Galadriel's Lament, neither of which made it to the films. However, one bit of true Quenya in the films is both Aragorn's declaration at the coronation- Isildur's words as he leapt from his Númenorean ship- and the two Elvish words in "May It Be" by Enya.   
  
Sindarin was by far the most common Elven tongue spoken in Arda, though in places you could have heard Telerin, most likely in one of the Elven-havens near the Sea.  
  
As you may have deduced, Grelvish, even if it was accurate Elvish, would have still been highly awkwardly used in the Third Age, when most Elves had gone back to the West and those that remained knew little Quenya (save their Lords, Ladies, Kings, Queens, and general Leaders, as well as any Elf who had lived in the First and Second Ages) and would not have been able to speak it at all, but perhaps write it. In the Grelvish examples I used, all but one of the words had a very clear Quenya root-stem, hence bringing it closer to Valarin and Doriathrin, which, by the time of most Mary-sues and the Lord of the Rings, would have been solely spoken in the West, Aman, if Doriathrin had not fully died out.  
  
And The Author's Drivel  
  
All Grelvish copyrights go to the Grelvish site. All Quenya and Sindarin is of the Tolkien Estate. Many thanks to Ardalambion for having that Quenya course and run-downs of every language in Middle-earth- may your life be long with Elvengraces upon you!   
  
If the above essay, or indeed anything at all, didn't make sense, please don't hesitate to flame me. Or you can leave an email or review- whatever. 


End file.
